Assertive Media

SEO RANKING FACTORS FOR 2026/2027 What you NEED to know! There are THOUSANDS of factors for consideration when ranking - partly because ranking is the culimination of good SEO, demonstrated trust, authority and positive user behaviour. There's a huge amount that goes into ranking, in this article we give you an overview of the ranking factor's WE'D pay attention to in 2026/2027! We're not talking about keywords in titles or H1s, we're talking about document accessibility, rendering, domain and document level content quality factors and more! Check out our ranking factor deep-dive for 2026/2027 assertive-media.co.uk/blog/seo-ranki…

Google processes around 13.7 billion searches a day. ChatGPT handles around 2 billion queries. Perplexity, 780 million a month. The gap is real. Traditional search still dominates. But the question people keep framing wrong is: which one do you optimise for? Both. And they're not as separate as they look. SEO gets your content found. LLM optimisation gets your content used as the answer someone receives. Quality content that's clearly structured and genuinely useful tends to work in both worlds. The mindset shift is that you're no longer just trying to rank. You're trying to be chosen. We've been at the forefront of search since 2007. Here's how we're thinking about the integration of both right now. assertive-media.co.uk/blog/tradition…

Gary Illyes, Google. Direct quote: more than 90% of websites don't need to think about crawl budget. He also pointed out the term "crawl budget" wasn't coined inside Google. It came from outside. So why does it appear in every SEO proposal you've ever received? In 2018, a Google data scientist published an unusually candid post about the actual optimisation problem Google had to solve around recrawling pages. It's one of the more useful things you can read if you want to understand how your site actually gets read. The answer to whether you should care is somewhere between "it depends" and "not really." But the reasoning behind it changes how you think about your site architecture. assertive-media.co.uk/blog/should-yo…

Most sites that "optimise" internal links do it by topical relevance and anchor text, then stop. That's not wrong. It just ignores the thing that decides how much a link is actually worth: PageRank. A link from a page with a strong backlink profile passes considerably more equity than a link from a page with none. The difference isn't marginal, yet most internal linking work treats every source page as equal. Our SEO Lead Stefan Krcelic has written up the approach we use, starting from your strongest pages rather than the most topically convenient ones. The short version: ➡ Find your power pages. The pages attracting the most backlinks on your site. GSC's Links report is the most reliable source because those are links Google's systems recognise. Ahrefs or Semrush work too. ➡ Check the candidate before adding anything. Is it topically related enough that a reader wouldn't be surprised where they land? How many links already sit in the body copy? PageRank splits across every exit on a page, so a heavily linked page passes less through each one. John Mueller confirmed as far back as 2021 that too many links weaken the structural signal. ➡ Don't double up. If the page already links to your destination, a second link gives you next to nothing. Net new links only. ➡ Placement matters. First third of the body copy. Google's reasonable surfer patent describes links being weighted by how likely a real user is to click them, and a link buried in the final paragraph of a long article is doing far less work than the same link near the top. One link per candidate page. High up. Topically sensible. From pages that have actually earned authority. Both approaches look identical on the surface, the link exists either way. Across a full site, the difference in how equity gets distributed is significant. Full guide from Stefan: assertive-media.co.uk/blog/start-wit…

The posts are everywhere right now. "I was paying an agency £5k a month, replaced it with a £20 Claude subscription." I installed the Claude SEO skills, ran a full audit on our own site, and let it run for 20 minutes across 40 pages. What came back was revealing. Not in the way the LinkedIn crowd wants you to think. Before you fire your agency and hand your SEO strategy to a GitHub repo with a few thousand downloads, probably worth seeing what it actually produces. assertive-media.co.uk/blog/i-tested-…